Friday, January 24, 2014

Jan 24 2014 Philippine Suertres/Swertres Tips and Lotto Results

No more questions about it. Davidson Bangayan is the alias David Tan, the alleged Goliath of rice smuggling. He himself swore so, in a court affidavit that was presented to the Senate hearing last Wednesday.

During the televised event, Justice Sec. Leila de Lima and the diligent among the senators swapped bits of their respective researches. From the revelations, it would seem that the Dept. of Agriculture and the National Food Authority are into every racket involving rice. The very officials tasked to boost harvests and stabilize retail rates are profiteering from it — to the loss of farmers and consumers.

Start with the DA-NFA’s farmers-as-importers scheme, by which Bangayan used farm cooperatives as fronts to import rice. He claimed it wasn’t smuggling but “consolidating”; that is, he financed cash-starved co-ops. They wouldn’t have qualified for the DA-NFA special import permits. For, it costs about P7.5 billion to bring in the 300,000 tons of rice that the DA-NFA was allocating to them (one-third to one-half of the government’s yearly imports in 2011-2013). But quoting whistleblowers, de Lima said Bangayan filled out all the co-ops’ import-quota bidding forms and prices, for submission to the DA-NFA. It doesn’t matter that he paid the co-op officers P20 per sack upon bagging a 10,000-ton chunk of the quota. The point, from de Lima’s narrative, is that he rigged the DA-NFA biddings.

The rigging was pulled off because of colluding DA-NFA insiders (which this column repeatedly has been exposing for a decade). The crooks concocted the import scheme under the past administration, purportedly so that farmers could earn from importing what they lost from unprofitable planting. Knowing, however, that the farmers had no capital to import, they pointed them to cohort-financiers. The present admin continued the racket.

There were times when Bangayan directly engaged in smuggling, de Lima said. He allegedly brought in, undeclared, double the rice volume stated in the DA-NFA import quota, or reused expired permits. This was done in cahoots with Customs crooks; a retired agency bigwig says Bangayan, aka Tan, had bribed ports inspectors P6 billion in ten years. DA-NFA men were involved too. They deliberately were loose in monitoring the compliance with quotas, and in retrieving used permits.